iPhone users have been waiting for full Flash support for a while, after all, according to Apple’s winsome adverts the iPhone doesn’t offer a watered down version of the internet, “it’s just the internet”. Quite.
Even so Steve Jobs’ advice seems to be, don’t hold your breath for Flash and in Apple’s shareholder meeting on Tuesday, made comments indicating that architectural limitations in Flash itself are what is holding the tech back.
An Apple developer document published in June entitled “Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone” contained guidelines urging developers to “deal with the existing omission of Flash,” and suggested they begin using more open alternatives recommending CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax.
The rest of the document didn’t paint a rosy future for Adobe Flash integration either and Jobs stated on Tuesday that Flash Lite (the mobile optimized version) “is not capable of being used with the web” and “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. Damning.
The whole picture seems to indicate that alternatives are a priority over going through the laborious and time consuming process of crafting a robust conversion of Flash Lite that is efficient enough to run on the iPhone’s ARM processor without causing it to overheat and rinse battery power.
This on the back of Microsoft’s recent partnership with Nokia to push the Silverlight alternative to Flash Lite in the mobile space totals a bad week for Adobe and its ageing Flash platform. If mobile computing really is the future, now might be the time to evolve if Adobe wants to hold on to its relative ubiquity in the rich Internet content stakes.
(Via AppleInsider)
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